Emergence of complex society in prehistoric Korea

A highly stratified society had emerged in the Korean peninsula by the beginning of the Christian era. It was expressed symbolically by ownership of valued goods and status burials. Four factors are basic to understanding the emergence of stratification in prehistoric Korea, around 2300–1700 B.P.: autonomous sociocultural evolution within the peninsula since early Chulmun Period, external pressures from more advanced culture spheres in Manchuria and northern China, the existence of elites able to facilitate integrative process, and warfare and conflict. The external pressures, in particular, resulted in a sociocultural process characterized as a secondary formation. For the evidence of emerging social complexity and stratification, the authors examine various archaeological data, with a special focus on differentiated mortuary architecture and its associated objects. Ancient Chinese accounts are considered as complementary evidence.     

The politics of assessment: water and sanitation MDGs in the Middle East

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is generally considered to be making adequate progress towards meeting Target 10 of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which calls for halving the proportion of the population with inadequate access to drinking water and sanitation. Progress towards achieving Target 10 is evaluated by the Joint Monitoring Programme (JMP), run by UNICEF and WHO. This article shows that the assessment methodologies employed by the JMP significantly overstate coverage rates in the drinking water and sanitation sectors, by overlooking and ‘not counting’ problems of access, affordability, quality of service and pollution. The authors show that states in MENA often fail to provide safe drinking water and adequate sanitation services, particularly in densely populated informal settlements, and that many centralized water and sanitation infrastructures contribute to water pollution and contamination. Despite the glaring gap between the MDG statistics and the evidence available from national and local reports, exclusionary political regimes in the region have had few incentives to adopt more accurate assessments and improve the quality of service. While international organizations have proposed some reforms, they too lack incentives to employ adequate measures that gauge access, quality and affordability of drinking water and sanitation services.     

Environmental Externalities,Median Voters,and the Multicentric City*

Abstract. This paper presents a new theory of the formation of a multicentric city and shows an example where median voters prevail in the social choice of land use patterns. To be specific, environmental externalities of work zones give an incentive to voters to form multiple subcenters in a city even in the absence of agglomeration economies. In addition, the land use pattern chosen closely follows the median voter's preferences under appropriately structured choice process. In this demonstration, zoning is as much the mechanism by which the internal structure of a city is organized as it is the one used to organize the metropolitan fabric of local governments in the Tiebout‐Oates‐Hamilton system.